Search results for: "Form"

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  2. The Path Has a Goal
     … You want there to be people who are suffering so that you can enjoy being compassionate to them? Your sense of wellbeing needs to feed off other people’s pain? What kind of ideal is that? The best possible ideal is to follow a path leading to a happiness that doesn’t depend on other people’s suffering in any way, shape, or form … 
  3. Lessons from the Breath
     … But if you do it with knowledge, it goes in the other direction and helps form a basis for your other intentions as well. When you’re going to act—when you’re going to say things, do things, or think things—it’s based on your perceptions and your feelings, the things you focus on as being important. This is all in the … 
  4. Mindfulness of Death & the Deathless
     … The specifics can make many, many more forms. But he says you cling to your craving in the same way that a fire in one house, as it moves to another house, clings to the wind. We would say that the wind blows it, but their explanation was that the fire needed some sort of support, some sort of sustenance, and the wind is … 
  5. Weathering Karma Storms
     … So, we all have our problems getting the mind to settle down, and those problems will come in different forms. If you’re experiencing a mind storm right now, you can say, “Okay, this is my past bad karma, but I want to make sure I don’t make any bad karma now by the way I breathe, by the way I talk to … 
  6. All of a Piece
     … a self with form, a formless self, a finite self, an infinite self, a little self inside the body like little homunculus, or your body inside a much larger self. However you define self, he says, that comes under the issue of the not-self teaching. Ideally, just don’t even think in those terms. But like karma, it’s not as if, when … 
  7. Skillful Desire
    It’s often assumed that the Buddha criticized desire of every form. After all, he said the three kinds of craving were the cause of suffering. But those three kinds of craving don’t cover every kind of desire. In fact, he says all phenomena, all experience, come from desire. That includes skillful and unskillful qualities in the mind. The only thing that doesn … 
  8. What You Bring to the Moment
     … Where is the breath in dependent co-arising? It’s down there in the name and form. And even prior to that, it’s in fabrications, sankhara, right after ignorance. If you look at your breath through ignorance—in other words, not in terms of four noble truths—even just the act of breathing together with your perceptions and feelings about the breath can … 
  9. Shelter Through Restraint
     … You’re going to watch for thoughts to form. You don’t leave the breath, but you’re looking in two directions: at the breath and also at the tendency for anything else to come up and disturb it. Because what you’ll find as you catch your thoughts more and more quickly, is that they begin with a little knot of tension in … 
  10. Look at Yourself
     … So even though experience may be formed out of just little impressions that arise and pass away, and we know that, we can still go for things because we think it’s worth it—that there’s something to be gained by going for them. So you want to watch yourself in action as you go for things. If you see yourself going for … 
  11. Brahmaviharas at the Breath
     … about the way you’re breathing; about the way you’re talking to yourself; about the perceptions you hold in mind, the way you relate to your feelings—all three forms of fabrication. The Buddha lays them out as a list of alternatives: bodily, verbal, mental fabrications. If something’s going wrong, it’s with one of these. Which is it? If you’ve … 
  12. Confident, Steadfast, Resolute
     … They’re both forms of desire and passion. Craving is like thirst. Clinging is like eating. There’s desire and passion both in the thirst and in the eating. You begin to see this in your own mind. You can see how you feed on things, and you understand clinging a lot more. It’s in committing yourself that you take what you know … 
  13. Universal Truths
     … Those are the teachings that form the framework of the questions that he encourages people to ask. In terms of skillful and unskillful action, he said, this is what you should ask wise people: “What is skillful? What is unskillful? What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness? What when I do it will lead to my long … 
  14. The Skill of Happiness
     … Here’s a human being who was able to develop qualities in his mind that we all have in potential form in our minds. In so doing, he was able to find a happiness that was not only solid and secure but also totally unburdensome: It placed no burdens on anyone at all. You look at the pleasures of the world, the happiness that … 
  15. Exercising the Mind
     … Even though we may be able to think of some forms of happiness that are not especially peaceful, when you actually look at them, you realize the reason you find them good is because you can stay with them for at least for a certain stretch of time. With the breath, if you’re really mindful, you can stay with it for as long … 
  16. Ven. Ananda’s Awakening
     … We’re focusing on what the Buddha calls “form.” When he classifies the in-and-out breath, he doesn’t classify it as a tactile sensation, he classifies it as an aspect of the wind element in the body, which is one of the elements that make up your inner sensation of the body, what’s called proprioception. And that wind element can be … 
  17. Goodwill Is Respect
     … The Buddha lists one of the forms of suffering as not getting what you want. He goes down the list of things that people want: They’re subject to aging and they’d rather be free from aging. They’re subject to illness and death and they’d rather be free from illness and death. They’re subject to sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, and … 
  18. The Web of Pain
     … They are there in their potential form, but you don’t give them your attention, and so they never really develop into the bad pains they could be. Just this much gives you a lot of insight into the power of the mind, the power of choice you have here in the present moment.
  19. Meaning & Happiness
     … Then, when any other forms of happiness are proposed to you, make sure you keep the Buddha’s happiness in mind, and that you keep your standards high.
  20. Sit with It
     … A simple form of mental strength is just learning how to sit with the mind when it’s being ornery, being obstreperous, when it’s hard to figure out what’s wrong, because the only way you’re going to figure out what’s wrong is if you sit with it and watch. You can think of another analogy: a hunter. The hunter goes … 
  21. Equanimity After Victory
     … So use the concentration to fight off the hindrances and then use it to develop other, subtler forms of discernment. When the mind has come to discernment—the discernment that comes as you peel away layers of fabrication on the mind—then you can arrive at equanimity. But you don’t stop with equanimity in the practice of concentration. You use that equanimity to … 
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